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Articles Conference Reviews |
A.9 Rethinking TransferA.9 Rethinking Transfer, Renewing Pedagogy Many panels at this year’s CCCC dealt with the question of transfer and this early session, dominated by presenters from Florida State University, was standing room only, seeming to indicate the intense interest in this topic among attendees. Liane Robertson’s presentation was first on the docket and she shared the preliminary results of her study tracking the experiences of students who had been enrolled in a pilot “teaching for transfer” model of first-year writing. The study was in the second semester of its second year and Robertson reported that the students in the teaching for transfer course appeared to demonstrate what she called “writing confidence” in that they knew what questions to ask to determine the rhetorical situation of their later writing assignments in other courses. Robertson’s results also indicated that those students appeared to be making sophisticated connections between content and context. While Robertson’s study is still ongoing, I was impressed by the methodology of using student perceptions via interviews to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular curricular approach in first-year writing. In addition, the question of transfer was treated in a complex, nuanced manner by this study. David Slomp presented next, sharing an update on a University of Alberta study he had described at last year’s CCCC. Slomp’s focus this year was on how we evaluate the question of transfer. He placed that issue within the context of a pilot Writing about Writing composition course and its assumption that student meta-cognitive awareness is key to transfer. Based on interviews and portfolio reviews of five students from the study, Slomp argued that we need to have a “wide, exploratory net” when it comes to evaluating how students from diverse backgrounds and experiences react and learn in any writing classroom and proposed that instead of the behaviorist notion of “knowledge transfer,” we instead look for a transactional theory of transfer to help us deal with what he termed the “messy” elements of tracing any student’s learning. While Slomp’s primary conclusion in this presentation was more of a theoretical or conceptual one, I found his reference to two particular student experiences compelling in making his argument that we need a concept of transfer that allows us to take into account what he termed as “the things they carried” into our classrooms. The third presenter was Elizabeth M. Fogle-Young who shared her perspective on the Writing About Writing approach from both a student and an instructor perspective. After describing her own experience as a student in FYC in which she could only remember the topic being debated rather than any instruction in writing, Fogle-Young then explained her work incorporating the reflective aspects of the WAW model into FYC courses. She has completed two small-scale (semester-long) studies of single courses to determine if students’ reflective letters at the end of the course demonstrated their ability to articulate an awareness of terms, concepts, etc., that could lead to a transfer of what she termed “course knowledge” to other work. While her initial findings indicate some incorporation of generalized reflection and even a few specific references to terms from the course, Fogle-Young noted that in order to fully understand the presence of any transfer, longitudinal studies are required. While this presentation was perhaps the most pedagogical of the panel in that Fogle-Young spent most of her time sharing the construction of her particular course, I was intrigued by her use of the familiar self-reflective letter produced by students at the end of the semester as a source of data for this type of research. The final presentation, before Kathy Yancey’s response, was by Kara Taczak, from Florida State, who was also pursuing the connection between reflection and transfer. Taczak shared student responses to the “theory of writing” assignment that capped the “teaching for transfer” curriculum in a second-semester writing course as well as her own preliminary reflections on the student interviews and other data. The underlying theme of those reflections seems to be that students in a course that asks for significant reflection and focuses just on the topic of writing will initially react with resistance because it feels different from what they expect a writing, or English, course to be. Taczak reported that, for the most part, that resistance was overcome as the students progressed through the course and that several students did indicate to her that they were using the concepts and ideas from that “different” writing course in other classes. Taczak’s presentation was an interesting mix of student and instructor reflections and as such, felt familiar and insightful at the same time, especially when exploring the students’ tendency toward resistance when they are asked to do something unfamiliar. The panel ended with Kathy Yancey’s prepared responses to the four papers; her observations, also circulated in a prepared handout, pulled the main points of the panel together and offered reflections on the possible ways forward. Among her several observations was the acknowledgement that simply focusing on “awareness” is no longer sufficient; instead we need a theory or philosophy of transfer to guide our research further. In addition, Yancey emphasized the value of ensuring that the content of a composition course is writing and that the variations on the Writing About Writing models in place around the country are promising and encouraging. The final reflection I will share here is that the role of prior knowledge and identity in our students’ development is likely much more complicated than we have previously accounted for and that we must make room for that in any future studies. Overall, this panel, scheduled during a packed concurrent session, was one of the most intriguing and well-considered sessions I attended all conference. The overlap between questions of transfer and the Writing About Writing curriculum seems promising both from a pedagogical and a research perspective and sessions like this demonstrate that potential. |